Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

real world effects:

a. does gov't wealth transfer XYZ ultimately (after all short and long-term effects are factored in) lead to more economic growth for the country?
(are we assuming that more economic growth is an inherently good thing, if we already have reached the basic degree of wealth?)
b. does gov't wealth transfer XYZ ultimately (after all short and long-term effects are factored in) lead to a fairer share of wealth?
(are we assuming that a small gini coefficient is an inherently good thing? why?)
c. if we have to make a decision between a 'rising tide' vs. smaller gini coefficient, what's the point where we'll sacrifice one for the other?
d. does the economic context affect the morality of wealth transfer XYZ? (is it moral for greece to increase the size of its welfare state today?)

wrt a: no, we shouldn't assume economic growth is an inherently good thing.
wrt b: fairness is a moral concept.
wrt c: I'm interested in arguments that decide the "point" on moral grounds.
wrt d: I think morality doesn't apply to democratic nations as a whole, but only to individual agents.

It's not shocking that so many classical economists were utilitarians.

c. you can't decide that point on moral grounds without agreeing to an economic framework and working out the math. you can plot that trade-off on an graph, put your finger on it and say "there, that's the moral point" but the graph first requires an agreed-upon economic framework.
d. then how can you discuss the morality of an economic concept?

and b. yeah I prob shouldn't have used the word fair, that term already assumes something. I meant 'smaller disparity'.

I think that if you are asking 'why should...' anything, then you are asking a moral question. All of the arguments for the welfare state (or any other kind of state) are moral, because you have to decide on a goal, and why that goal is better than any other. For us in general? We all know why the welfare state is better - fewer people starve, die of unnecessary illnesses or exposure due to homelessness, Whether these are worthy ends is, of course, a moral argument.

fewer people also starve, die of unnecessary illness etc. thanks to the wealth gains from free markets

wrt c: sure, fix some economic framework & ask what's the right action given that framework. I was thinking of this as less "first principles work" than "given current economic reality, what's the best secular moral case for a welfare state?"

wrt d: we're being asked to pay taxes in order to support our welfare state. is our participation in that transfer of wealth morally permissible? obligatory? optimal?

alternately: is participating in that transfer conducive to the good life?

Well, if we assume that reducing death, illness, homelessness etc. are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic: Does our current course of action help us achieve these goals. Free markets do help in this process, to a point, but a stage is reached (a long time ago) when it becomes an obstacle to these goals. Either way, we always have to first decide what we want from life, what a society or government is for. Then it's just statistics.

'given current economic reality' - I mean, there is no easy or absolute 'economic reality', there are drastically different ways of looking at macroenconomic data and there are very different lenses with which people look at it. and even those have changed drastically over the last decade. 'fix some economic framework' isn't easy or quick - and in the process, you've already included a certain moral framework.

basically I think economists are the moral philosophers you're looking for

By "current economic reality" I mean our present economic practices: how we trade, etc. My proviso was there to indicate that I'm not envisioning some kind of reductio against Western capitalism.

xp absolutely not, they are as I said earlier mostly utilitarians, & that's the kind of technocratic reduction I want to avoid.

Who would be a deontological economist, some of the hardcore Monetarists or Adam Smith types?

idg technocratic as a bad word. I mean it's used to describe mcnamara types, but in a strict sense, why is a technocratic view of things reductionist?

I'd say anyone approaching this subject without realizing how much of it is political-economic is being reductionist.

Well, if we assume that reducing death, illness, homelessness etc. are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic: Does our current course of action help us achieve these goals. Free markets do help in this process, to a point, but a stage is reached (a long time ago) when it becomes an obstacle to these goals. Either way, we always have to first decide what we want from life, what a society or government is for. Then it's just statistics.

if, changing nothing else, we decided it was illegal to charge more than $1 for a prescription in america, the immediate effect would be very, very good socio-economically, as millions of people would have cheap access to medicine. the long-term effect would not be entirely good. you can't isolate these actions from their effect on markets.

i feel as if iatee you are saying that all political or economic arguments are founded on a fully-examined set of ethical beliefs? is that correct or what am i misunderstanding?

euler do you think there's a religious argument for the welfare state?

no, not always full-examined! but it makes more sense to examine the morality *behind the system* than a specific concept within it.

why is a technocratic view of things reductionist?

Here's why. Take the following passage:

if, changing nothing else, we decided it was illegal to charge more than $1 for a prescription in america, the immediate effect would be very, very good socio-economically, as millions of people would have cheap access to medicine.

Being "good socio-economically" ≠ being good. That's the reduction I'm trying to avoid.

I was responding to "are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic"

max: yeah, I think so, in classical Catholic writing on social justice for instance.

it makes more sense to examine the morality *behind the system* than a specific concept within it.

is that a kind of abstract morality belonging to or residing in the system itself then?

Euler, are you looking for a non-utilitarian argument for the welfare state?

NV: that would be great! A secular non-utilitarian argument.

the long-term effect would not be entirely good. you can't isolate these actions from their effect on markets.

No, I agree with you. I think we're making the same point. So the decision to immediately charge $1 for meds would end up not fulfilling our criteria for a good economic policy.

(because if we're going to have any impact on the current austerity programs in the West, we're going to need arguments that don't simply have sectarian appeal.

basically, I think this is a great question: is 'clearly defined form of keynesianism xyz' moral? y/n

moral analysis of a welfare state will be an inherent part of that discussion. and 'how should a welfare state operate' is included in that model.

I agree, iatee.

i have real difficulties with secular, deontological ethics. where do you begin to draw the authority for your "ought" from?

so maybe we don't disagree much!

but until you pick and very clearly define your keynesian economics xyz / whatever else - which involves economic logic of some sort - I don't think you can approach the welfare state. it doesn't exist as an approachable concept without that context.

xp

Sure, iatee: but I don't think that's the end of the task. Transfers of wealth within such an economic system is what needs to be judged as moral or not. I'm happy to fix such systems & ask for each one, if that transfer is moral, & then vary the systems & ask those questions again. We could treat those systems as a parameter & see how the morality of the welfare state varies for each such value.

xp to NV: Kant says that "oughts" derive from the nature of rationality. That's pretty wacky too.

yeah i get what Kant says

okay I gtg but I will try and make this point quick:

I don't think you can construct an overarching economic logic from the bottom up - from judging the morality of a billion individual acts. the economic logic ultimately has to be overarching and so while you can maybe 'judge' the individual acts moral or not moral, the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important.

xp to NV: yeah; my impression of the "state of the art" today is that no one really gets why rationality itself should be the ground of morality & so neo-Kantians like Korsgaard are working on grounding morality on autonomy, which Kant mentions in accord with the categorical imperative ("treat people as ends not means to ends") but whose connection in the texts is not especially.

what i'm getting at seems to relate to your idea that states can't be "moral" in themselves. i agree to the point where i wd argue that systems of economic organisation aren't "moral" and that an individual's political beliefs have to be founded on something other than morality.

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

ok, NV: the hard thing for me is to see where an individual's beliefs about what she ought to do are "political" & where they are "moral".

a big part of the problem is that we can probably agree on a very broad deontological morality that is pragmatically true for the vast majority of people. eg. it is wrong to kill another human being (except in defence of yourself or a third party). as soon as i apply that kind of ethics to the political sphere, i get into a hugely difficult argument about how my actions contribute to the state, whether states' actions contribute to killing people, what would be the best kind of state to avoid killing people etc.

the sheer multiplication of individual contributions to the functioning of a state makes an uncomputable system of consequences based on individuals' ethical choices, it seems?

and i'd argue that the same near-chaotic system works to exclude utilitarian moral decisions too.

Wondering why utilitarianism is out of the equation here, and if you're similarly down on other forms of consequentialism eg Rawls' theory of justice. Deontology is a non starter imo.

xp to euler

xp to NV: yeah, those are in particular problems of representative democracy, since my main political act in such a system is my vote for/against people who will make the decisions of the state.

your main political act in a representative democracy needn't be your vote tho. you could have a moral imperative to become actively involved in a party for example.

xp to ledge: I accept the usual objections to utilitarianism, but more importantly I think it distorts what we're doing when we reason morally into a type of calculation, which closes off lots of considerations that ought to be part of moral deliberation: what particular people mean to us, for instance.

xp to NV: sure, you could choose to become a representative yourself. I've been thinking a lot about that recently, kinda thinking we all here should run for office (no idea how reasonable that is to do in the UK; in the USA it's totally doable)

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

even given the constraints I gave earlier (we start ot w/ "let's assume political-economic system x"), if we put 'the welfare state' in a glass box, look at it and conclude 'this is a morally good thing' and then put 'lower taxes' in a glass box, look at it, conclude 'this is a morally good thing' - well, I'm not sure what the usefulness of that exercise was. they don't operate in glass boxes, they operate as parts of the same system.

bigger picture: I don't think you can analyze an economic object that operates in a utilitarian system from a non-economic, non-utilitarian POV. non-utilitarian economic systems and economic logic exists. in theory and in history and in the world today. but 'the welfare state' as we understand it, and as matters to america in 2011 can't exist without that framework.

so if you're gonna say 'okay, I'm gonna accept utilitarian ethics as a framework for how the economic world operates because it's pretty hard to build a comparably sophisticated model - *however* - after accepting that, I'd like to make future decisions using 'ethical system XYZ'.

sure, then you can pick your overarching (utilitarian...) political-economic logic based on 'ethical system XYZ' and if that includes some sort of welfare state, then you can manage cost-benefit decisions of that welfare state using 'ethical system XYZ'. I think there is some room for that...

I've got a question I wanna throw at you guys. It's a rhetoric question. There's this rhetoric move where you are explaining why somebody did something bad. For example, "he killed that woman bc of his deprivation + impoverishment" or, "they flew the planes into the twin towers bc of united states support for israel and military bases in saudi arabia" or "they conduct terror attacks because of settlements in the western bank." You've probably heard many examples of this - basically a cause is assigned to a particular condemned action. Now when you use this trope, you tend to say (to disavow condoning the action): "I'm not justifying [attack/murder/whatever], I'm just explaining the context for it. But the distinction between contextualization and justified has never been properly unpacked for me. In a real rhetorical sense, what is the difference between a justification and a contextualization? Doesn't context provide justification?

Which is to say: If X caused Y (which is the contextualization assertion) how can you simultaneously assert that Y is independently worthy of condemnation and also that X is a cause for it? If X caused Y, then X is entirely to blame. Y is just the consequence. Justification is inherently packed in. Now you could argue that X provides a space for Y to occur in, but that Y is independently caused. But lots of things provide spaces for other things to happen in and you wouldn't say that have any culpability at all in those things happening. For instance, packed subways can give cover for perverts to rub themselves on victims, but packed subways have no culpability for that action. If you said, "let's understand why this person was victimized -- it was because the subways were allowed to become packed," people would rightly protest because we understand that action Y has to be individually fueled and context X cannot explain it. However with this hot topic political discussions, we do talk in this way. We simultaneously try to assert that X can explain Y, but that Y is also at fault on its own merits. How do we reconcile this (apparent?) rhetorical paradox?

depends on who's making the rhetorical move - at its basest, this argument totally is "X caused Y" and the "i'm not justifying" is made in bad faith. but i think most people don't believe in a hard causality of human action. in that case, the argument is closer to "without X, no Y, but X is not sufficient cause" i.e. the arguer is suggesting that altho moral culpability resides in the perpetrators of Y that culpability is diminished, not disappeared, by event X. and this applies in lots of legal areas i think, when we talk about "mitigating circumstances". those circumstances tend not to excuse a crime but to diminish the severity of punishment because they claim a partiallly causal trigger.

(in yr subway argument nobody sensibly wd claim that conditions which allowed the crime to take place where also partially causative)

(incidentally i think i do believe in hard causality but i have no choice)

It's interesting bc the claim X caused Y is never accompanied by the explicit claim that Y's culpability is diminished, and in fact I will often see that rhetorical move made w/ the simultaneous claim that Y's culpability is in no way diminished, which, I think you're agreeing, is paradoxical.

My philo friend I'm talking to says that the question is the divisibility of explicability and excusability and is inherent in the question of PSR. So for Spinoza where you could reconstruct everything if you understood all the causes, there is no divisibility at all between them but for, say, Kant where there's a moment of choice, that can divide them in that moment.